Some Users Say Win7 Wants To Remove iTunes, Google Toolbar

Foofoobar writes "Due to a strike with the UK's postal system, people in Great Britain are getting copies of Windows 7 early and have already posted their experiences about the install process. Some have an easy time but others post installs taking 3 hours including Windows asking them to remove iTunes and Google toolbar prior to installation." The article indicates that many of these early users, though, are having better luck.

From TFA...

[golden age villain]

"At the end of it, Windows put back the drivers I removed, and I reinstalled iTunes which worked fine without any configuration, my library and apps were all there."

About iTunes -- from the article

[rwade]

Here's the a quote from the article of a user who found that Windows 7 asked that the user uninstall iTunes:

...and I reinstalled iTunes which worked fine without any configuration, my library and apps were all there.

While I agree it is suspicious that iTunes and the Google Toolbar were the only applications that Windows 7 ask that particular user to uninstall, it should be made clear that Windows 7 did not impede the user from using that software or foist a MS application on him.

I will note that many users had significant difficulties with using non-Apple software after upgrading to Snow Leopard.

I myself have had significant difficulties using already installed software after upgrading various shared libraries via ports on FreeBSD.

I would suggest that these issues are along the lines of what Microsoft was doing when it asked the user to uninstall iTunes and the Google Toolbar.

Oh, FFS!

[R2.0]

From TFA:

"The upgrade process gave me a list of about 5 programs to un-install," he says. "Which I did, it was some drivers, iTunes and the Google Toolbar. After that the whole thing was automatic, I just left it sitting there... At the end of it, Windows put back the drivers I removed, and I reinstalled iTunes which worked fine without any configuration, my library and apps were all there. I have to say that is about the most successful Windows upgrade I have ever personally experienced."

Yep - a disaster in the making.

Re:I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article (emphasis mine):

The upgrade process gave me a list of about 5 programs to un-install...

A full install will just clear the file system's file pointer table (quick, recoverable format), or truly format the drive before proceeding.

Crappy Summary

[Anonymous Codger]

What a crappy, dishonest summary! I despise MS as much as anyone, but this is too much. Yes, it asked them to remove iTunes, etc., but then it reinstalled them! And everything worked.

Lie about windows to get posted on slashdot

[Useful Wheat]

Did the poster even read the article? The summary is longer than the sentence that mentions this.

"The upgrade process gave me a list of about 5 programs to un-install," he says. "Which I did, it was some drivers, iTunes and the Google Toolbar." What does the author say about this horrible, horrible thing? "I have to say that is about the most successful Windows upgrade I have ever personally experienced."

That's not sarcasm, that's not some biting commentary at microsoft, that is a user who is content with his instillation of Windows 7 on a computer. This is not an article about how microsoft is afraid of competition and squashes even the slightest attempt at competition, this is about how 3 people were relatively happy with their instillations.

The poster picked the single most insignificant statement out of context, and made it their headline. I'm not sure if the poster was being ironic, or trying to troll linux fans into reading a pro-microsoft article, but the summary has almost nothing to do with the article.

The upgrade didn't make you purge your computer of open source software. Windows 7 didn't make you uninstall OO.O, or even Lotus Notes (which really, needs to die). The upgrade did not purge your computer of competitor's software, it just so happened that those 2 programs needed to be reinstalled.

Re:Sounds good to me

[maccodemonkey]

QuickTime is what iTunes uses for it's MP3/AAC decoding engine, which is why it's installing QuickTime. It's not just installing it to force it on you, it's actually a dependency. This is why iTunes on Mac OS X is still a QuickTime 7 app. It can't move to QuickTime X because QuickTime X is not cross platform.

Re:You can add them back...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try installing 3rd party software on OS.X that does bastardised non standard installs that alter the core drivers of your system (like apple does) then see how stable your upgrade is on OS.X

Re:Sounds good to me

[tepples]

And then every time it asks me for an upgrade, it insists on installing Quicktime and other things that I don't want on my PC.

If you're talking about QuickTime Player and Safari, consider this: The iTunes application relies on the QuickTime framework to play media and the WebKit framework to display iTunes Store and iTunes LP. Trying to run iTunes without QuickTime and WebKit is like trying to run Windows Media Player without Windows Media or trying to run VLC without libavcodec.

Re:Sounds good to me

[Blue Stone]

>If they could permanently get rid of Quicktime, I'd be a happy camper. Windows 7 has native support for Quicktime files through Windows Media Player - and Explorer - with thumbnails and everything! Sounds like your dream's come true.

Re:Crappy Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

The games may well work but the DRM that comes with them may prevent the games from running.

To be completely off-topic, I'd like to say this is an awesome synopsis of what DRM does.

Re:Lie about windows to get posted on slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

The upgrade did not purge your computer of competitor's software, it just so happened that those 2 programs needed to be reinstalled.

I can even tell you specifically why those 2 programs should be uninstalled then reinstalled after the upgrade. No, it's not because Microsoft's trying to stick it to competitors.

iTunes messes with your USB stack by installing system-level drivers, and since the whole underlying OS is changing, those drivers will likely not work right after an upgrade for reasons that should be blatantly obvious to anyone who considers themselves 'good with computers'. The best practice is to let the iTunes installer see that it's installing on Windows 7 and configure the drivers correctly for the new OS.

Google Toolbar installs differently depending on which version of Internet Explorer it's installing into. Vista users may be using IE7, whereas Windows 7 comes with IE8. Technically using the IE7 interfaces to extend IE8 is supported, but it forces some backward-compatibility hacks to be enabled, which slows the entire browser down. By uninstalling and reinstalling after the upgrade, you get the IE8 version of the Google Toolbar and it runs better.

No problems here... Old versions maybe?

[Anonymous Freak]

eh, I had no problems with the latest versions of both iTunes and Google Desktop (which includes Google Toolbar.)

Maybe they had older versions?

Heck, I had more compatibility issues upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard.

Re:Sounds good to me

[GrimyR]

Check out Quicktime Alternative http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm [free-codecs.com]

Re:You can add them back...

[zach_the_lizard]

iTunes installs a USB driver on Windows.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[NiceGeek]

There is a workaround for that.
http://icrontic.com/articles/upgrade-the-windows-7-rc-to-retail [icrontic.com]

Re:Sounds good to me

[maccodemonkey]

Um. QuickTime IS a DLL (a very large one) with a media player. QuickTime is an API that includes a media player. I work in the industry, and I do programming with the QuickTime API. The largest use of QuickTime is likely software using the QuickTime API. Adobe ships very large pieces of software on Windows that include QuickTime because of the QuickTime API, for example. Again, the components of QuickTime that seem to annoy people are very small, and easy to remove. Do you honestly think a half dozen audio codecs, and another half dozen video codecs would make for a "small" DLL?

Re:Windows Upgrades

[GIL_Dude]

I would have put myself solidly in the "never upgrade, always do wipe and load" camp until Windows 7. I've now upgraded three machines and it has gone very very well. (I would still wipe and load for corporate purposes to be sure the machines are 100% the same).

For this specific item they mention here about iTunes... The beta version of the upgrade advisor merely recommended that you deauthorize iTunes on your computer before upgrading. Apparently nobody could figure out how to do that, so they now recommend that you uninstall iTunes, then upgrade your machine, then re-install iTunes. I guess this is to make sure your computer remains authorized for any content you bought although I can't give results for that as I only have content I ripped from CD myself. I can say I have done one machine each way - I uninstalled for this notebook I am on now and I just deauthorized for my wife's notebook. Both upgrades worked flawlessly.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:That's not an excuse

[negRo_slim]

Right on! I feel exactly the same way. Unfortunately, Microsoft does the same thing. If you remove WMP, most Microsoft games released in the past few years will fail to play video/cinematics, and sometimes audio. :P

K-Lite Codec Pack [google.com]

Re:Windows Upgrades

[w0mprat]

Software like iTunes and Google Toolbar make deep low level changes to the operating system, so I'm really not suprised that these have to be uninstalled before upgrading.

I wouldn't be suprised if most 3rd-party applications that install system services have to be uninstalled before the upgrade.

Many applications like these mess with things that really you really shouldn't be messing with, especially when many comparable applications seem to have no need to embed themselves so deeply, and likely have much less bloat.

As for upgrades breaking your old applications - running in compatibility mode for a older OS will solve 9/10 compatibility issues, but this feature seems to be ignored.

Re:You can add them back...

[shutdown -p now]

Windows is not Unix.

Nevertheless, a Windows service is a userspace application.

Re:About iTunes -- from the article

[DevStar]

It's not that suspicious. It asked me to uninstall SQL Server 2008 and MagicDisc. I uninstalled Magic Disk, but SQL Server I decided to roll the dice on, because it is a pain getting it set back up the way I like it on my dev box. A month or so later, no problems (I'm on MSDN).

Re:Windows Upgrades

[w0mprat]

Microsoft doesn't even strictly adhere to their own APIs, leaving it full of quirks, ask any developer.

Microsoft follows their publised API's and published guidelines. Most other companies DO NOT. They take shortcuts to try and get things done quicker and almost always get it wrong.

There is some fault of MS, as developers come up with hacks to get things to work smoothly with API quirks. But just about every purveyor of bloatware including your list commits the sin of using undocumented features in unintended ways. Thus things break.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[Itninja]

I upgraded Vista Ultimate x64 to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and had no significant issues [blogspot.com]. The 'upgrade advisor' program even advised me to deauthorize my installation of iTunes before continuing. No fuss, no muss, as they say.

Re:That's not an excuse

[Rix]

Apple forces people to install iTunes to access their iPods.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[Achromatic1978]

Software like iTunes and Google Toolbar make deep low level changes to the operating system

iTunes in particular. How many system services does that thing install by default? IIRC, at least 4! Quicktime helper, iTunes helper, Bonjour/mdns, iPodservice, and that's before it attempts to foist Safari on you...

Re:You can add them back...

[LO0G]

And a CDRom driver - GEARAspi which totally screws up CDs sometimes.

So how many reboots are required?

[Edmund Blackadder]

True story: I recently got a new computer and set it up for dual booting Windows/linux. It took me more time and more restarts to get Windows working normally even though the computer actually came with windows preinstalled and i had to instal linux from scratch.

Re:Sounds good to me

[Achromatic1978]

Again, the components of QuickTime that seem to annoy people are very small, and easy to remove. Do you honestly think a half dozen audio codecs, and another half dozen video codecs would make for a "small" DLL?

Huh, what?

A codec is a mathematical algorithm. Are you telling me that the codecs for interpreting an MP3/AAC stream, etc, are SO COMPLEX that the math for them can't be contained in less than 40 or 50 megabytes of compiled code?

Survey says: horseshit.

Check out VLC sometime. It does more in a quarter of the size of Quicktime than Quicktime does, by far, in terms of codecs.

Re:Sounds good to me

[Techman83]

Fortunately you can use tricks [google.com.au] to run itunes using the Quicktime Alternative [free-codecs.com]. I use this method on peoples machines that I know will install it regardless of my advice.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[shadowturtle]

It's known to do this. It has to do with iTunes messing with the drive's High and Low Filters. When I deleted the registry changes, iTunes gave a warning message every time it loaded, but still worked fine. Plus, the drive "magically" began working again. Apple talks a little about how these filters can mess with iTunes if changed. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2615 [apple.com]

Re:Sounds good to me

[Per Wigren]

Do you honestly think a half dozen audio codecs, and another half dozen video codecs would make for a "small" DLL?

libavcodec [ffmpeg.org] currently has decoders for 242 audio and video codecs, encoders for 100, demuxers for 129 container formats and muxers for 89.
The resulting DLL is about 7 MB.

Check your facts

[amake]

stay well away from Apple's AAC DRM-ed nonsense

Apple no longer sells DRMed AACs. AACs you rip yourself have never had DRM.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[jellomizer]

Upgrade your Linux distribution... Ooop there goes your custom kernel. Upgrade Firefox, Oh some of my addins don't work any more.
When I went from OS X Leopard to Snow Leopard my SVN Client failed to run. It happens sure LInux and OS X are better at this, but still it hapends. Don't let your zealotness for other OS's make you blind to their problems.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

7 is, after all, merely a rebadged Vista with the nextstep dock thrown in... if one is feeling cynical.
7 is, after all, merely a refactored/cleaned up Vista with a nice taskbar, but not the nextstep dock thrown in... if one is feeling cynical or is talking out of their ass.

TFTFY

Re:Windows Upgrades

[TJamieson]

Don't forget the lovely AppleMobileDevice service -- installed just in case you decide to buy an iPhone / iPod Touch at some point. Completely useless without one of said devices.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[Ralish]

There should be very little, particularly as the Windows kernel hasn't undergone any massive reworking, however, there are two particularly likely cases:

a) As another poster mentioned, poorly designed software which relies on API functionality that is subject to change. Seriously, Windows software does this all the time, and not just small-time developers, huge software companies (ala. IBM/Google/etc...) have in the past and I suspect continue to use Windows "features" that aren't meant to be used by anyone outside of Microsoft. This typically means using undocumented APIs or API calls that Microsoft does not expect anyone to use, and thus when they change them (which should be fine, no-one should be using them), things break horribly. The other obvious example is dumb assumptions (running as an Administrator is a classic example) but there are many other more subtle ones.

b) Software that installs stuff into the kernel is far more likely to be incompatible without an update or patches (e.g. hardware drivers/virus scanners, etc...). While it's fashionable around here to label Windows 7 as a rebadged Vista (and prior to this Vista SP2 until people realised that Vista was about to get a second SP), the Windows 7 kernel has undergone some significant changes. One was alluded to here just recently [slashdot.org]. For those who care, Mark Russinovich has written (several?) articles on the Windows 7 kernel changes and various video interviews are available (on Port 25?). While the Windows kernel driver framework hasn't undergone significant changes (which was the primary reason for the seriously crap driver situation on Vista for quite some time), there have been changes to it and many modifications to other parts as you'd expect.

I obviously can only guess on the reasons for iTunes/Google Toolbar being blocked during the upgrade process, but if I were to place a bet, the Google Toolbar might have compatibility issues with the version of IE in Win7. Even though Vista has IE8, it won't be identical to that in Win7 (even if it may be aesthetically), and this can have potential ramifications for browser plugins. As for iTunes, it's a bloated piece of crap that consumes insane amounts of resources (at least on Windows) and has been known to do bad things to the USB stack. It wasn't too long ago XP machines were blue screening due to a buggy iTunes driver (painfully ironic while Apple is playing ads poking at Windows stability, while actively contributing to its lack of) and just recently I found a nasty handle leak that resulted in iTunes consuming several thousand handles a day and not releasing them, I managed to get it to just shy of 30,000 within a week. Would I be surprised if iTunes were doing stupid things that would cause incompatibility during a Windows upgrade? Not even slightly.

WRONG

[pastafazou]

It's not iTunes that does this. iTunes licensed Gear's ASPI drivers for burning support within Windows. The Gear drivers are Microsoft XP and Vista signed drivers that strictly adhere to Microsoft's rules. On a clean install of XP or Vista, iTunes and the Gear ASPI drivers work 100% of the time. However, many other programs that implement CD-burning without signed drivers can cause the Gear ASPI drivers to break.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[Hal_Porter]

Maybe you don't install toolbars and the like? Toolbars are very invasive in Windows - many of them will install global hooks. This is a horrible technique where you load a DLL into every process in the system and that DLL can be installed as a WndProc for every Window. The idea is that you have a chance to look at all messages.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644990(VS.85).aspx [microsoft.com]

Now the problem with an upgrade in the presence of things like this is that probably a Windows hook can be made to work with 90% of applications when it is released. The other 10% will have some sort of issue. New applications will probably fare worse and a new OS will introduce all sorts of issues.

Actually I've got Google Desktop Search installed here and it looks like unlike the MSN and Yahoo toolbars it does not do this - I don't see any 'foreign' DLLs injected into a notepad process. These days the Microsoft DLLs are all signed code and every single DLL in the Notepad process has a Microsoft signature.

Re:That's not an excuse

[earlymon]

First off, there's no legitimate reason iTunes has to use QuickTime for MP3/AAC decoding.

You do know that iTunes is nothing more than an xml browser / front-end for the QuickTime engine, yes?

There are plenty of other options.

Only beginning with completely re-architecting iTunes, but, golly, after that, sure, it would just be a breeze.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[bruce_the_loon]

VMWare's VSphere client. Amazing, Virtual Server Console, Virtual Infrastructure Client (3.5.0) works, but VSphere was broken. Had to hack a DLL location and put it into debug mode to work.

Other than that, not much I've run across.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes is the biggest P.O.S. I've ever used... it's worse than Windows: ME (ok, so maybe not quite as bad).

iTunes is the most bloated, resource hogging app I have on my PC for what it offers (browsing an online store, creating playlists and syncing my iPhone).

P
O
S

Period.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[Allador]

All that fear mongering was a bunch of hooey.

What is locked out?

Nothing.

Do P2P apps work properly?

Yes

Are there unexplained phone-homes?

Vista and W7 are much more thoroughly instrumented than XP was. Many of these will send anonymous usage and config data back to MS. These are all well documented and understood, and don't really cause any concern for privacy.

They're largely all disable-able, though they are scattered, as many of the product groups rolled their own systems for this (ie, office vs. media player vs wga, etc).

Can I still play out-of-region CDs?

This is dependent on the hardware and software you use. But the OS in no way gets involved.

Do I have to fight UAC like someone with Vista?

Loaded question. UAC on Vista (post SP1) worked exactly as it was intended. Any problems you had you should blame on your app vendors.

Or yourself, if you chose to not customize UAC behavior to your liking. It is tremendously customizable (even in Vista) in how it behaves, how it prompts, whether or not to use the secure desktop, etc etc. If you don't like it, just configure it so that you do.

W7 loosens it a bit so that many actions that the OS perceives as 'initiated by the user' dont cause an elevation. This is how it ships. You can turn it back to Vista style if you want, or otherwise customize it.

Can I copy any standard file type on to any standard media?

Yes.

Re:Windows Upgrades

[Rob the Bold]

FYI: WMI was out in 98, you should have been able to enumerate the ports. But yes, I get the point you're trying to make, sometimes you need to resort to a hack, and hacks break across versions.

I was really hoping that this had been completely solved by now -- I hadn't had to worry about it for 7 years. I'll take your word on the WMI in 98 part.

However, IEnumWbemClassObject, which seems to be what's used sometimes nowadays (from my brief web search), only became available in Win 2000, according to MSDN. There's really nice page on the serial port problem at http://www.naughter.com/enumser.html [naughter.com]. The author states that his sample code

provides 9 different ways (yes you read that right: Nine) of enumerating serial ports: Using CreateFile, QueryDosDevice, GetDefaultCommConfig, two ways using the Setup API, EnumPorts, WMI, Com Database & enumerating the values under the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM

The sample comport enumeration code project appears to have been started in 1998 and is still under development in 2009.

The WMI version uses what I consider to be the ugly hack of comparing the names of the resources found to string "COM" followed by a numeral to get the name and port number.

This still appears to be a bit of an issue, judging by coding forums I browsed (sysinternals, msdn, etc.) To make a long story short -- too late -- it would appear that MS still doesn't have a standard (and easy) way to do this across all versions of Windows.

My involvement in this fiasco mercifully ended in 2002 when the company producing the program was subsumed into another entity and the whole project terminated.